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Friday, September 14, 2007

X Prize Foundation Targets The Moon

The X Prize Foundation, the Santa Monica-based foundation behind the Ansari X Prize, said Thursday that it has launched a new prize which targets putting people on the moon. The foundation said that it will offer a $30M prize to a privately funded team which lands a robotic rover on the Moon, and which sends back video, images, and data back to Earth. The new prize is being funded by Google. The Google Lunar X PRIZE is broken up into a $20M grand prize, and includes a $5M second prize and $5M in bonus prizes; the deadline for reaching the Moon and receiving the full prize is December 31st, 2012, with prize amounts dropping after that time.